I wrote last Friday about the forced labor situation perpetrated on guest workers at a seafood supplier for Wal-Mart in Louisiana. Now, the National Guestworker Alliance, the feisty labor rights group which helped a group of exploited foreign exchange students at a Hershey chocolate factory get justice last year, will take these guest workers on [...]

The next several months will continue to feature message votes from both sides of the aisle and both chambers in Congress, teeing up specific TV ads for the fall campaign. While Republicans have basically passed the breadth of their agenda with message votes, from the budget to social issues, Democrats have been a little more [...]

The aide who leaked that President Obama and John Boehner were close to finishing a deal with $3 trillion in defined cuts and $1 trillion in aspirational revenue worked for the Senate Democrats. Practically every media outlet in the nation is reporting on their anger. Harry Reid, who learned about the all-cuts deal in the [...]

The Senate will pass the two-week budget extension, with $4 billion in cuts, this morning, probably by around 11:00am. And debasing themselves even further, they come up with the “we lost this round, but just you wait until next time” spin. It’s the Brooklyn Dodgers strategy, I guess. But they can’t even agree on what [...]

On the Senate floor just now, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) extended the debate over unemployment benefits, which should pass in a matter of hours, to its logical conclusion – the incessant gridlock and comic dysfunction of the “world’s most deliberative legislative body” is entirely a function of outdated Senate rules which must be changed. Here’s [...]

Jeff Merkley is absolutely right to denounce President Obama’s offshore drilling strategy, including by pointing out that oil companies already hold thousands of leases on federal lands and aren’t drilling there. Frank Lautenberg calls the policy “Kill Baby Kill” and he’s not wrong – development in the Gulf of Mexico and the lower Atlantic could [...]

Tom Coburn got a bit too clever by half with his health care amendment that every member of Congress be required to sign up for the public option. He wanted to use it as a cudgel, and tried to block Sherrod Brown from signing on as a co-sponsor. However, the negative attention from this forced [...]

The first amendment introduced on the floor of the Senate comes from Sen. Barbara Mikulski, seeking to add a provision included in the HELP Committee version of the bill. This measure would mandate coverage – for free – for various women’s preventive health procedures and screenings. This is a direct response to the controversy surrounding [...]

The inclusion of the Stupak amendment in the House health care bill certainly represented a setback for women’s health. But a provocative article in The Nation suggested that other portions of the bill shortchanged women by not requiring certain basic preventive services for women, or enabling providers to charge extra for them. Sharon Lerner argues [...]